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ABSTRACT
A white, wealthy, educated male, Victor Frankenstein spends a good portion of Mary Shelley's novel complaining about being a slave to his Creature. Victor's laments draw attention to Frankenstein's engagement with debates about race, slavery, and abolition. The novel seems to ask what a slave is and thereby challenges notions about racial difference and the ideals of cultural/ intellectual superiority that support enslaving populations. Foundational studies by H. L. Malchow and others on race in Frankenstein have defined the views of Shelley's father, William Godwin, as well as the pervasive ideas of the era, to clarify the ways in which the Creature is racially coded to align with stereotypes about Blacks in particular. Using these studies as a starting point, Maisha Wester specifically examines the ways in which Shelley's text engages the anxieties born out of slave insurrections and Britain's abolition of the slave trade. To this end, she explores Shelley's depiction of the turbulence in British society arising from these issues, showing how the Creature's attacks metaphorize the insurrections that disturbed the era's notions of racial difference. Ultimately, her essay explains how Victor is, indeed, a "slave"-as are many others like him.
KEYWORDS: slavery; master-slave relationship; Frankenstein; Mary Shelley; H. L. Malchow; Mary Wollstonecraft; William Godwin; San Domingue revolt; Olaudah Equiano
Roughly halfway through Frankenstein, after meeting the Creature and learning of his life, Victor Frankenstein begins to complain of being a slave to his creation.1 As a wealthy, well-educated white man, however, Victor is the last person who would, during this period, have been enslaved. Rather, his socioeconomic standing and race position him to serve as slave owner and master to the marginalized figure of his Creature. So how, then, can we account for Victor's illogical, yet fairly frequent, complaints of enslavement?
While we may see Victor's laments as typical for the early nineteenth century and his use of the term slave as signifying the submission of individual will to any tyrannical force, reading the Creature's narrative alongside Victor's complaints draws attention to the ways in which the novel intimately investigates the actual institution of slavery and its actors. Indeed, as scholars such as H. L. Malchow, Jack Halberstam, and Allan Lloyd Smith have explained, Mary Shelley's descriptions of the Creature...